{"id":6499,"date":"2022-01-10T00:00:14","date_gmt":"2022-01-09T22:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=6499"},"modified":"2022-12-17T11:04:37","modified_gmt":"2022-12-17T09:04:37","slug":"temptations-of-the-imagination-how-jana-elhassan-and-samar-yazbek-transmogrify-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/temptations-of-the-imagination-how-jana-elhassan-and-samar-yazbek-transmogrify-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Temptations of the Imagination: how Jana Elhassan and Samar Yazbek transmogrify the world"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
“Disfigure,” courtesy artist Reem Tarraf (b. 1974, Homs, Syria).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

All the Women Inside Me<\/em>, a novel by Jana Elhassan
\nTranslated by Michelle Hartman
\nInterlink Books<\/a> (2021)
\nISBN 9781623718862<\/p>\n

Planet of Clay,<\/em> a novel by Samar Yazbek
\nTranslated by Leri Price\u00a0\u00a0
\nWorld Editions<\/a> (2021)
\nISBN 9781642861013<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rana Asfour<\/p>\n<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Planet of Clay<\/em> is available from World Editions<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\"\"<\/a>
All the Women Inside Me<\/em> is available from Interlink<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

Imagination, as Albert Einstein once said, will take you everywhere, whereas logic can only take you from A to B. Many experts agree that this ability to produce and simulate novel objects, sensations, and ideas in the mind without any immediate input of the senses, creates a place that allows us to make sense of the outside world and to create a new reality within us. This \u201cmental reality\u201d is where most of us escape when at odds with the way things happen to be on the ground.<\/p>\n

In Lebanese novelist Jana Elhassan\u2019s novel All The Women Inside Me, <\/em>her protagonist, Sahar, relies on her imagination to act out all of the desires she has been denied throughout her life as she struggled to survive a cold childhood, overshadowed by her parents\u2019 unhappiness and their distant relationship to her, an abusive marriage, and a series of disastrous relationships. \u201cTo be honest,\u201d says Sahar in the novel\u2019s first chapter, \u201cI\u2019ve always loved the things that existed only inside my own mind. I felt safe weaving facts into my imagination, because then I could experience their specificities and be done with them whenever I wanted…I knew that it was Me who was in control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Imagination again presents itself as the only coping strategy for the young protagonist in Samar Yazbek\u2019s novel Planet of Clay. <\/em>Rima is a woman-child traumatized by the horrors and atrocities of Syria\u2019s ravaging civil war. She finds refuge \u201cin a fantasy world full of colored crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince<\/em>, as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits.\u201d In a quote published at the beginning of Yazbek\u2019s book she reveals that her choice to remain in the realm of wonder is in fact \u201cto outstrip the violence of the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

J.R.R. Tolkien declares in his essay \u201cOn Fairy Stories<\/a>,\u201d that the imagination is a \u201csub-creative art which plays strange tricks with the real world and all that is in it,\u201d allowing us to morph ordinary elements from the environment, into extraordinary ones. We do this to attain joy, safety, sanctuary, and control, rendering us the uncontested architects of our destinies, free to reclaim the narrative and shape the world according to our desires.<\/p>\n

All the Women Inside Me<\/em>, newly translated to English, is the author\u2019s second novel and was shortlisted for the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It explores the reasons why women in abusive relationships keep silent. It also spotlights the social, religious, and political context related to these women\u2019s circumstances, as well as their upbringing.<\/p>\n

The novel opens with Sahar, a woman of no agency, recounting a childhood lived in a conservative milieu in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon. Sahar\u2019s father is a lapsed leftist who masks his boredom by busying himself with great causes. Her depressed mother\u2019s nerves are as delicate as the crystal she keeps immaculately polished in her home, and her only hope is for her husband to notice her. Sahar grows up isolated and emotionally stifled, relying on her vivid imagination to conjure up an alternate world of men and women who live vibrant, colorful and fulfilling lives.<\/p>\n

In college, she meets Sami, who wants to know everything about her and seems to be the escape she is looking for. Briefly after marrying she realizes that not only is the union an enormous disappointment compared to her fantasies, but that she had \u201csurrendered to her death\u201d under Sami\u2019s domination. Her recourse is to bury her feelings of anger and disappointment alongside her childhood sorrows. Little by little, she is shocked to discover that she has turned into her mother \u2014 the woman she had refused to be.<\/p>\n

The novel takes a dark turn at this point as Sahar chronicles the abuse and her feelings of humiliation and degradation that come with the beatings as well the annihilation of the self as Sami transforms from the \u201cAbsolute\u201d she had fallen for, to someone abhorrent who reduces Sahar to \u201ca body of ashes,\u201d \u201ca black hole, a woman with no scent, a stick broken off a tree branch, lying on the ground for people to tread on as they passed,\u201d while in her imagination she conjures up a magical being with the gift of extraordinary strength.<\/p>\n

And while it is evident that the female characters in the novel are a reflection of how patriarchal societies would like their women to act and be \u2014 docile, grateful, silent, perfect \u2014 the male characters themselves don\u2019t fare much better in such a poisoned environment; a charlatan sheikh trades in religious magic, making a profit off of people\u2019s misery, a boyfriend leaves his great love to marry a \u201cmore appropriate\u201d good girl, and a seemingly pious man metes horrendous physical and emotional abuse on a defenceless woman.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Jana Elhassan is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Lebanon who has worked as a journalist for leading newspapers and TV since 2008. In 2015, she was featured in the BBC 100 Women Season, an annual two-week season that features inspiring women from around the world. Her first novel won Lebanon\u2019s Simon Hayek Award and her second and third novels (Me, She, and the Other Woman\u00a0and\u00a0The Ninety-Ninth Floor) were shortlisted for the International Prize of Arabic Fiction. This is her second novel to be translated into English. Her translator, Michelle Hartman, is a professor of Arabic and francophone literature at McGill University in Montreal.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Elhassan also explores the dynamic relationship and psychological thread that binds people to place, a process that shapes who we become. As Sami guides Sahar around his childhood haunts in Tripoli and tells her the stories that come with them, Sahar is able to piece together how Sami\u2019s memories of his city, its residents and his family shaped his feelings, behaviors, and identity. In an interview with Arablit<\/a>, Elhassan explained how she \u201cwrote the city through the body of a woman to show how similar they are and to reflect on how the social context and internal psychological aspects intertwine to produce damaged personas and places.\u201d This conjures American essayist Rebecca Solnit, who wrote how the places in which one\u2019s life are lived \u201cbecome the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.\u201d<\/p>\n

The novel is a captivating and ambitious undertaking by Elhassan and her translator Michelle Hartman, who according to her note at the end of the book translated the novel in a series of long binge-like sessions during the pandemic, to produce a work that demonstrates how although the life of the mind is capable of offering refuge from psychological and physical abuse, it can also turn into an unhealthy obsession that could blur the line between what is real and what isn\u2019t. Where this novel truly excels is in how it unabashedly poses resonant questions about domestic abuse, religion, motherhood, and female solidarity and insists, despite crushing despair, on life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

Planet of Clay<\/em> by Samar Yazbek is a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. It is a portal onto the war in Syria as witnessed by Rima, a young girl from Damascus, who is cursed to wander wherever and whenever, as if \u201cwings sprouted between her toes.\u201d Naturally, in a society that places shackles on everyone\u2019s movement, particularly its women \u201cwho are forbidden from going around unless it\u2019s for something absolutely necessary and urgent,\u201d Rima\u2019s affliction ensures that her personal space is restricted and controlled from her early beginnings. As a child, she is bound by a rope to her mother\u2019s wrist except for those times when she is tethered to the bed or when she is accompanied by her brother to the mosque. He would tie her to him with a rope long enough to allow him to wait outside the girls\u2019 room in the neighborhood mosque where she eagerly learned to read and recite the Qur\u2019an. \u201cI used to sing the Qur\u2019an,\u201d she says at one point. \u201cOnce, I recited the Qur\u2019an to the young man I let touch my chest, he was stunned, and after that a long time passed and I forgot about singing and reciting the Qur\u2019an.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Samar Yazbek\u00a0is a Syrian writer, novelist, and journalist. She was born in Jableh in 1970 and studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and a scriptwriter for Syrian television and film. Her novels include\u00a0Child of Heaven<\/em>, Clay<\/em>, Cinnamon<\/em>, In Her Mirrors<\/em>,\u00a0and\u00a0Planet of Clay<\/em>. Among her accounts of the Syrian conflict are A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution<\/em> and The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria<\/em>. Yazbek\u2019s work has been translated into multiple languages and has been recognized with numerous awards. Her translator Leri Price attends to contemporary Arabic fiction \u2014 her translation of Khaled Khalifa\u2019s Death Is Hard Work<\/em> was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature (US) and winner of the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Although Rima\u2019s \u201ctongue was stopped\u2019 after a harrowing incident at a checkpoint at the early onset of the Syrian war, and she doesn\u2019t understand much of what surrounds her, she soon finds that she prefers to communicate through her drawings, a more apt medium than words. However, after being rescued from a military hospital and tied up in a basement in Ghouta, a besieged suburb of Damascus to which her brother has brought her after rescuing her, Rima, with access to only pen and paper, proceeds to write down her story, primarily about the \u201cdisappearance\u201d of her mother, the days \u201cbefore the summer sky rained those bubbles with the horrible smell,\u201d and the women who sleep in their hijabs who might die at any moment (and they do), worried about their modesty. Young Rima writes and writes, assuring her imaginary readers from the outset that her story is not only real but also the complete truth. She promises more of the same should she survive.<\/p>\n

This is a bleak, haunting novel, difficult at times due its heavy subject but nonetheless a powerful narrative from the Syrian war\u2019s most vulnerable. It can be slightly disorienting due to the unreliability of its young narrator, whose voice fluctuates between that of an adolescent and an adult. Yazbek refers to fairy tales and fantasy to hone her themes of women\u2019s freedom, the relationship between writing and violence, and the new language we might construct in the midst of the terrible events we are living through, with multiple references to Alice in Wonderland<\/em> and The Little Prince<\/em>, from which the title of the book is derived. \u201cRima is a woman-child who tells of the war through her initial shock,\u201d says Yazbek in a quotation printed on the first page of the novel.<\/p>\n

Leri Price\u2019s translation is exquisite and masterful, a further demonstration of the heights to which language can soar, and a testament to the vividness of imagery, both uplifting and horrific. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t normally recommend translating a book about a girl trapped in a cellar while a global lockdown kept us all trapped in different ways,\u201d Price confesses, \u201cbut it must be said that Rima was consistently an enjoyable companion throughout a difficult time \u2026 and I hope readers respond as I did to her boundless curiosity, her sharp eye, and her soaring, striving, limitless imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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